From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ultimate Guitar Archive, also known as
Ultimate-Guitar.com or simply UG,
is a large guitarist
community website known for
its large amount of guitar and
basstablature, reviews of music
and equipment, interviews with notable musicians, online written
and video lessons, and forums. It was started on October 9,
1998 by Eugeny Naidenov - a student of economic faculty of Kaliningrad State University, Russia.[1]

Contents

Community

UG is home of over 1,100,000 registered users.[3] It is a
strong community of forum users who frequent the site. Community
members may also create guitar lessons, and have their approved
works published on the website and read by its many users. Reviews
of CDs, DVDs, or gear and news articles can also be submitted by
members.

Like the tabs, the lessons and column are also rated by users,
which attributes towards UG Points (or rather number of
contributions), your UG score also increases, or decreases as the
members rate your contribution.

Although UG encourages participation, they also have a strict
guideline and set of rules that all UG users must follow. Members
must be over the age of 13 to use the services offered by the
site[4] and
only one account is allowed to be made per person.[5] Strong
language and strong media are also prohibited from use on the
site.

Forums

All main forums on Ultimate Guitar are included below:

• UG Community

New Members Q&A Forum

The Pit

Archives Of The Best Threads

• Music

Bands & Artists

Songwriting & Lyrics

Riffs & Recordings

Tab Talk

Musician Talk

Promote YOUR Band

Classifieds

• Instruments

Guitar Techniques

Acoustic & Classical Guitar

Electric Guitar

Bass Guitar

Guitar Gear & Accessories

Gear Building & Customizing

• Misc

Site Feedback

UG Contribution

The Pit

The Pit is the most popular and most active section of the
Ultimate-Guitar.com forums. It is the part of the site where the
registered UGers can discuss multiple topics, including those that
do not necessarily have to do with guitar or even music. Many
political, religious and topical issues are debated here.

Although The Pit is a miscellaneous section, certain standards
are upheld.

Profiles

On August 12, 2007, the Ultimate Guitar site launched "UG Profiles". This added
another feature to UG that other tablature sites do not feature. UG
Profiles can be used for networking, advertising gear, bands, and
users' own MP3 recordings, in a similar way to other sites such as
MySpace; unlike other
networking sites, UG Profiles are focused on those who share the
interest of guitar, or to a lesser extent, bass. Users are able to
add profiles for each of their bands, upload pictures of
themselves, as well as gear, display their "guitar skills", join
groups of interest, and upload MP3's of that specific user's
work.

MPA
conflicts

In late 2004-2005, after taborama and mxtabs.net began closing due to legal threats
from the Music Publishers Association
of America, UG saw a surge of new users flock to the community.
UG, which pays licensing fees to publishers, was unaffected by MPA
legal actions. As stated in an article posted on the site, UG finds
the MPA to be humorous (a satirical picture stating "When you
download tabs from UG, you're downloading communism" was made in
response to the MPA's warnings) and does not take their warning
seriously, mainly because the site is based in Russia and is not
affected by American laws. The site also pays royalties to show the tabs on their
website.

Tablature

Tabs can be voted from 1 star (the worst) to 5 (the best) stars,
and comments can be made about the tab. Tabs of entire albums can
also be submitted. Many tabs are often added daily by the
community.

There are many different types of tablature files that can be
submitted to Ultimate-Guitar. Files such as basic guitar tabs and
bass tabs can be read from an Internet browser in ASCII format. Guitar Pro and Power Tab files are run
through programs that can play the tablature and often include
multiple instrument tabs. These files can be saved and opened on
the user's computer.